The Secret World

First off, I want to say that after reading previews and the premises of the game, I was super excited. It doesn't have traditional classes. As you gain XP and level up, you gain two different types of points. One drops into a certain type of ability that grants you bonuses and the other can be distributed via the ability wheel to gain active abilities and passive perks. You could essentially train melee and magic at the same time. Active abilities are abilities that can be used on the combat bar and the passive abilities are put in the passive bar and grant passive bonuses to your character or abilities.

There abilities are tiered so that you have to train the low level ones first to gain access to the higher level abilites. Abilites range from different types of magic like close combat chaos magic, ranged elemental to firearms and close combat weapons you can specialize in. It's a pretty diverse system.

I only played for about an hour to and hour and a half, but I think I got most all I needed. The first let down was movement. It was sloppy like SWTOR. Granted even though you're a human with special abilities, you can jump high enough to land on top of cars and trucks. Ability animations just didn't flow right. I'd click on an AOE attack and start spinning as I was moving and it would look like I was floating across the ground. At least early attack abilities (magic or otherwise) do not consume any type of magic/ability points. Some abilites have cooldowns and some abilities apply a type of combo point on the target that makes other abilities stronger. You could essentially sit there and spam your non cooldown attacks over and over and over. Quite boring.

The atmosphere was awesome. It was dark and dreary with a Cthulu-esque vibe going on. There were zombies, and demons, and extra dimensions. The setting was just insane and something that's never been tackled in an MMO, IIRC. It's modern day technology with a World of Darkness type setting.

Questing was routine and boring from what I experienced. I never made it to the multiplayer parts because the graphics engine was so painful. I know there are people that think that graphics aren't everything, but when they affect your enjoyability that much, it really brings down all the other things in the game.

Unfortunately I doubt I will be playing this. I was so looking forward to the game and hoping that it would be something amazing, but I see little chance in Funcom doing anything to the graphics engine and fixing what could have otherwise been a great game. If I have some free time on Sunday, I may play a bit more if the beta is still going, but so far it's just a huge let down.